W. V. D. Hodge

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. William Vallance Douglas Hodge FRS (17 June 1903 - 7 July 1975) was a Scottish mathematician, specifically a geometer. His discovery of far-reaching topological relations between algebraic geometry and differential geometry - an area now called Hodge theory and pertaining more generally to Kähler manifolds - has been a major influence on subsequent work in geometry. He was born in Edinburgh, attended George Watson's College, and studied at Edinburgh University, graduating in 1923. With help from E. T. Whittaker whose son J. M. Whittaker was a college friend, he then took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. At Cambridge he fell under the influence of the geometer H. F. Baker. In 1926 he took up a teaching position at the University of Bristol, and began work on the interface between the Italian school of algebraic geometry, particularly problems posed by Francesco Severi, and the topological methods of Solomon Lefschetz.